Scaffolding surrounds the bronze statue of Pope John Paul II, which is being remodelled after criticism. Photograph: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images

Hello there. I'm hanging up my comment hat for a few weeks and have moved over to news, where I'll be hunting down stories about religious affairs. This gives me the opportunity to send some Divine dispatches your way, as my colleague Riazat has done in the past. I hope you enjoy what I've managed to uncover so far …

• "Excessively spherical" is not a charge you hear levelled particularly often. But it is how the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, described the head of a statue of Pope John Paul II outside Rome's Termini station. The controversial work (picture here), by Oliviero Rainaldi, is to be remodelled (including the head) after a barrage of criticism since its unveiling in May.

• At the beginning of the week I found myself in Tower Hamlets to interview Lutfur Rahman, one of the country's most powerful, if controversial, Muslim politicians. Once a member of the Labour party, he was deselected but decided to run for executive mayor as an independent – and won. He's now had over a year in office. I was surprised to hear him say he had more in common with Prince Charles than David Cameron – in terms of his attitude to faith, that is. When I asked him about Cameron's speech on the Christian foundations of British culture, he said:

"My religion is a private thing … if you go back to Prince Charles, when he talks about faiths, religions: that's the kind of society I want to see, where no one particular religion has hegemony over society, we have a community of faiths.

For me there's a clear distinction between [Cameron's] approach and Prince Charles's, but I think Prince Charles's would be much more appropriate given the country that we're in."

• The university and mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo was once the most respected seat of theological learning in the Muslim world, though it has long been seen as a stooge of the Mubarak regime, which appointed its senior clerics. On Tuesday it issued a bill of rights, which it hopes will be incorporated into the new Egyptian constitution. Al-Azhar's grand sheikh told Associated Press that the bill would preserve freedoms of worship, opinion, scientific research and art and creative expression. A sceptical public remembers the books blacklisted by al-Azhar in previous decades. Its name may mean "the radiant" in Arabic, but will it turn out to be a leading light as Egypt struggles to balance religious and secular concerns?

• The Jewish Daily Forward has word of an official inquiry by Yad Vashem, Israel's centre for Holocaust research and commemoration. Since 1975 Belgian Robert de Foy, who died in 1960, has been listed as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations", a title accorded to gentiles who sheltered Jews from Nazi persecution or helped them escape. But, according to Sonia Pressman Fuentes, an American author whose family fled Belgium in the 1930s, paperwork exists showing de Foy actually recommended the deportation to Poland of her family and hundreds more. An investigation will decide if the honour should now be revoked.

• With former missionary Mitt Romney looking like a clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination, you'd expect an upsurge in interest in Mormonism from Americans curious to know more about the faith of a man who could end up as president. And so there's been debate about whether Mormonism is a form of Christianity, spotters' guides to Mormon celebrities, and speculation as to whether Mormons would have undue influence over the White House. Unfortunately for the churches PRs, it's the not entirely reverent musical by the creators of South Park, not the presidential candidate, that accounts for an otherwise encouraging spike in use of the search term "Mormon".